


Hallow's Eve

by Cuddlewumpus



Category: A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia (1990), Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Genre: Afterlife, Halloween, World War Two (mention)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:15:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27282526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cuddlewumpus/pseuds/Cuddlewumpus
Summary: It's All Hallow's Eve, 1939 and Winston Churchill can't sleep...
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	Hallow's Eve

**Author's Note:**

> Just a short piece I wrote for Halloween. Not my best, but the idea wouldn't leave my head.

**_Chartwell, Kent_ **

**_Tuesday, 31 October, 1939_ **

**_11pm_ **

Sleep would not come for Winston Churchill.

Since war with Germany had been declared two months earlier, he had been busier than he had been in years. First Lord of the Admiralty once again, he had his hands full with preparations for the war he had known was coming, that he had tried to prevent. The war was here now, and there was no more time to prepare. With all the work and all the toil, though, he could not find sleep, even in exhaustion.

It wasn’t just his work. Something else was preventing him from sleeping. He couldn’t put a finger on it, but something was wrong in the house. Had been for months. Things had been out of place, left where they should not have been, had never been before. He had questioned the staff, even spoken to Bill Deakin, one of his writing assistants, and had learned that he wasn’t the only person noticing things.

Small things were being altered throughout the house, just enough to confuse everyone but nothing so severe as to affect things too greatly. Empty teacups found atop the short garden walls near the ponds, various books left on tables in any number of the eighteen guest rooms in the house. And the fruit. The cook had ordered several dozen oranges, only to check the fruit box and find them all eaten. Only the peels left behind. A month before the oranges, it had been the same with the apples. Only the barest of the core and the seeds remained.

Strange doings, indeed.

On the second floor of the house, Winston opened the door between his office and his bedroom, and was about to try to force himself to sleep when something made him turn back into his office. An overwhelming feeling of _wrong_ had taken hold. He began walking around the room, peering about at everything, looking for anything out of place. Chairs were where they should have been, tables stacked with books as always, the chess set under glass…

Except it wasn’t.

The exquisitely carved ivory and onyx set was no longer under its glass cover. The cover was set a distance away, resting against a bookshelf. Winston knew with a look that the set had been disturbed. The onyx bishop had been moved.

Winston was furious. If there was a single unwritten rule amongst the staff at Chartwell, it was that the chess set much never be touched. The game laid out would remain unfinished, staying as it was, a silent tribute to the opposing player in the game; a friend taken too soon.

And now that tribute had been defiled.

He wracked his brain, trying to think of the last time anyone had approached the set. It had been years since he had set the cover on it, preserving the game, and he had memorized the pieces, thought through all the moves he and his opponent would have made. Moving the onyx bishop was the next logical move for the opposing side. Not that his opponent ever played logically. He had played with calculation, but would rather sacrifice a knight than a pawn. He had explained it once by saying _“I know what it’s like to be the pawn_.”

His ruminations on the chess set were interrupted by a loud thunk from behind him. Winston whirled around, pulse racing, tightening his fists, ready for trouble, but there was no one there. He scanned the room, wary and calculating the distance between danger and the door, but there was no one there. His heart slowly returning to normal, he walked towards the place where the sound had come from. In front of him, he found a book laying on the carpet. He reached down and picked it up.

It was a black leather volume with gold lettering on the spine and a beautifully carved and embossed medallion design on the cover. Even unopened, the pages smelled of spice; an aromatic ink used in the printing. In his hands, it felt even heavier than it actually was. Reading the spine, Winston felt himself grow cold.

It was _The Odyssey of Homer_. A translation in the style of a novel, a labor of nearly five years doing. Written by the hand of the same man who had sat opposite of Winston at the chess board.

It was too much.

Book still in hand, Winston fled his office. He barreled through the halls, down the staircases, flung himself through doors until he reached the outdoors. In the dark, crisp October air he could finally breathe. His pulse was racing again, and even deep calming breaths weren’t helping. His mind was reeling about.

_Oranges._

_Apples._

_Teacups._

_Books._

_The next move in the game._

_The fallen Odyssey._

Everything, _everything_ that had been happening lately all tied back to one person. One of Churchill’s nearest and dearest of friends, a man he had been finding himself missing a great deal since the war had begun. A man dead the last four years, buried in the cold earth of Dorset.

With a heavy sigh, Winston sat down in an empty chair, setting the book on a table within arm’s reach. In his mad dash from the house, he had found himself on the back terrace, where a few wooden deck chairs sat for lazy afternoon contemplation. They’d serve just as well now.

_He remembered it perfectly, that last day they’d been together. In had been in March. His friend had ridden his bicycle in, saying that his great beast of a motorbike was too expensive to maintain now that he had retired from military service. God, how Winston wished he’d kept that opinion. It was the motorbike that had done him in in the end. An accident on a country lane, a weeklong coma before Death had come, only a few weeks after their last meeting, their last unfinished game._

Even now, tears came to his eyes to think about it. 

So there he remained, lost in his memories, until he heard a distant rumble rolling over the hills. It wasn’t thunder. It was the rumble of an engine. It grew closer and closer, and then began to fade away. For a moment Winston thought it might have been the engine of a motorbike, but he’d banned them from Chartwell after the accident. Even military couriers had to dismount at the gates and walk to the house.

His mind still jumbled and unsettled, Winston decided that he needed a drink. Just inside the doors, there was a sideboard with the makings for any variety of things a guest might want. Winston quickly made himself a gin and tonic, and went to return to his wooden chair.

Only to find it occupied.

The figure in the chair was a small man, not much more than five and a half feet tall, wearing what had once been the uniform of an enlisted man in the Royal Air Force. He sat in the chair cross legged, his blonde head bowed over the black leather Odyssey he held open in scarred hands.

At the sound of Winston’s approach, the figure looked up, his famously blue eyes shining in the darkness.

“Hello, Winston.”

Winston Churchill couldn’t speak.

For years, he’d often wondered what he would say if he had one more chance to speak with the man in front of him. What final words of goodbye would pass his lips? He’d never answered his own question, he’d had too many thing he’d wanted to say. But now, hearing that familiar deep voice, that Oxford accent, he was at a loss for words.

“It can’t… you can’t…”

From his seat, T.E. Lawrence smiled gently. He closed the book at set it back on the table, keeping his eyes on Churchill. “Of course I can.”

Winston shook his head violently. “No. No. No. This is not real. It cannot be real. You are dead.”

“Yes, well, this is real.” The humor in his voice was evident. “And you are correct. I am quite irrevocably deceased.”

Winston felt himself begin to swoon. His vision grew foggy. He vaguely felt hands on his elbows and allowed himself to be guided to the chair nearest where he had previously sat. His glass was pressed to his lips and he took a few hesitant sips before it moved away.

Looking up he saw his ‘guest’ return to the seat he had previously occupied, only he too suddenly looked pale and tired.

Winston gave his hallucination – it had to be a hallucination, didn’t it? – an appraising look. “You look dreadful.”

In the other chair, Lawrence gave him a weak smile. “Interacting with the living world isn’t easy. Things, yes. People, no.”

“This has to be some kind of nightmare, or a vision. Something in my mind. This cannot be real.”

“It is real, old friend. I’ve been trying to get through to you for some time. We – the dead that is – can hear when the living think about us. You’ve been doing it a great deal lately.”

Winston shrugged. It was as good a time as any to exorcise a few demons, even if reality proved he was talking to himself.

“It’s common to think of the departed. Especially when one was unable to say goodbye.”

Lawrence flinched at the bitterness. “I wish it had been different. I’m sorry you weren’t able to… well. It wouldn’t have helped, though. I was a bloody mess. My brother was right to keep everyone away.”

“He let your friend Storrs see you.”

“Days later, shrouded in a coffin. It was… different for Ron. We’re a different kind of men, I think, those of us who were in Intelligence. Certain things we just don’t believe until we see them and touch them ourselves. Storrs would never have accepted it otherwise. And others accepted it because he did.” He shook his head. “Not that everyone did, anyway. Some daft ones think I’m still alive.”

“We didn’t want to lose you. We still needed you… I still needed you.”

“It wasn’t my choice to die, you know. It’s not what I wanted. I just wanted a quiet retirement where I could be left alone.” Now the bitterness shown in his voice, too. “But we don’t always get what we want, do we?”

Winston shook his head. “No. No, we don’t. I know you didn’t want to die, and we weren’t ready for you to. Everyone was devastated.”

Lawrence sat silently, holding his right wrist in his left hand, a gesture so familiar it made Winston’s heart ache.

Breaking the silence after a moment, Winston continued. “So, if you’re really dead, then what are you doing here? How are you here? What is it like? You simply must tell me everything, T.E..”

At the use of his initials – Churchill’s personal nickname for him – Lawrence smiled a bit, the bitterness fading. “Like I said, we can hear when the living think about us, and you were thinking very loudly. If we really try, we can interact in small ways…”

“Like leaving teacups and books lying about?”

“Yes, like teacups and books.” He looked down at his hands. “Those were the hard ones. I could manage about a book a day. The teacups were more difficult. But now, this time of year, when the living and the dead aren’t that far apart, it gets easier.”

“The oranges and apples? Spirits can eat?”

“Oh, yes, indeed we can. You know how much I loved oranges.”

“You called them ‘little balls of sunshine’ or something like that.”

“Exactly… and it got your attention. You started noticing things. It made it easier to appear if you were already thinking about me that strongly. I am sorry for frightening you, however. That was never my intention.”

“Why now, then? I’ve thought about you in the past. Why now?”

The smile faded. “Because things are about to get very bad, Winston. Very bad indeed. I wasn’t sure I’d have the chance again.”

“Very bad? You mean the war?”

He nodded. “It’s going to be ugly and brutal and horrible. Nothing we did before will equal what’s to come. The savagery of man…” He sighed. “It’s a rising tide that may overwhelm the world. I can’t stop it, not now. Perhaps you will.”

Churchill shivered. “You know what’s coming, then?”

Lawrence shook his head. “Not really, no. Generalities. But I’m looking into it.”

“Of course you are.” Winston noticed a faint drizzle beginning to fill the air. “Should we go inside? I think it’s going to rain.”

In response, Lawrence curled up to sit cross legged in the chair again. “There isn’t much time left. I’d rather… I’d rather stay out here if you don’t mind. I miss the rain.”

The two men sat in the steadily increasing rain until nearly dawn, conversing about old times: carving jack o’ lanterns with Winston’s children in the ‘20s, their famous camel ride to the Pyramids in 1921, and all kinds of stories from their individual pasts. Winston asked numerous questions about the afterlife and the spirit world, all of which Lawrence refused to answer in any comprehendible way. As they sat, Winston noticed that the rain seemed to pass right though his spirit friend, leaving him to appear dry while he was himself soaked to the skin by the time the sun began to rise.

Watching the first rays of light cross over the weald, Lawrence reached over and briefly rested a featherlight hand on his friend’s shoulder. Winston began to feel overwhelmingly tired, his eyes growing heavy and closing as the sunlight touched his face. The last thing he saw before falling into a deep sleep was the smiling face of his old friend becoming transparent in the dawn.

Winston Churchill wasn’t sure if he had been dreaming.

He had found himself asleep in a chair on the terrace, with vague memories of a conversation that could not possibly have been real. He saw the empty glass next to his chair and decided that perhaps he had had too much to drink the night before.

As he stood to go back inside, he picked up the black leather book on the table, expecting it to be soaked and ruined. To his amazement, it was hardly damp, with barely a few drops of water on the cover. He turned his gaze to where he had dreamed his old friend had been sitting with him, chattering away like old times.

The seat was completely dry.

Later that day, in his office, Winston gently reshelved _The Odyssey_ back in its place with T.E.’s other writings. He tidied up the other books that had been found around the house – _Arabia Deserta, The Oxford Book of English Verse_ and _Le Giantesque_ – and collected the cover of the chess set. As he went to set the cover back, he thought better of it.

He sat down, contemplating the board again, following the move of the onyx bishop. He had several moves in front of him, all but one would take an onyx pawn. Smiling to himself, he did what would have never been expected and moved his knight, leaving the pawns in place and risking the knight in turn.

Only then did he place the cover back over the chess set.

“Let’s see what you make of that, old friend.”

**Author's Note:**

> The books that Churchill picks up: 'Arabia Deserta', 'The Oxford Book of English Verse' and 'Le Giantesque', all have a connection to T.E. Lawrence. His translation of The Odyssey was widely published and read (and is still in print) and a limited edition as described was published in 1932.


End file.
